The Medici Conspiracy (36 page)

The judge in Medici's trial was in no doubt about this second version. He said it was “sweetened” and “contains blatant corrections aimed at avoiding possible demands for reimbursement from Museums which had, at very dear prices, purchased objects such as the Euphronios krater.” Just how prescient the judge was, we shall see.

Hecht's memoir is remarkable, too, for the candid light it throws on other aspects of the antiquities trade. In one section he describes how art
and antiquities can be used to obtain highly questionable tax breaks from the Internal Revenue Service.

In the mid-1970s, Hecht crossed paths with Bruce McNall.
^p
They met in May 1974, at a coin auction in Zurich, when McNall, using funds from one of his backers—whom Hecht names—paid the then-record price for a coin, 850,000 Swiss Francs for an Athenian decadrachm.

On that same trip, McNall showed the backer “four fresco panels of the fourth century B.C.
which decorated a tomb at Paestum, an ancient Greek city about 50 miles south of Naples.” The backer bought them from McNall for $75,000 and later gave these same frescoes to the Getty where they were valued at $2,500,000. Hecht observes dryly at this point that the backer was in the 50 percent tax bracket
,
and so, by deducting this from his taxable income he saved $1,250,000 in taxes, in effect a profit of $1,175,000. Later, Hecht says, this backer told him that he “collected” antiquities only in order to make donations to museums and it wasn't worth his while unless he could get them valued at five times what he had paid. Hecht gives two other detailed accounts of “collectors” who acquired antiquities simply to take tax breaks.
³

In the spring of 1975, McNall proposed that he and a certain Sy Weintraub become full partners in Hecht's holdings and they set up two businesses in Los Angeles, the Summa Gallery and Numismatic Fine Arts. These enjoyed mixed fortunes—which Hecht explores in his memoir.

A late episode in Hecht's memoir reveals perhaps more than he intended. Here he is describing the process by which the Princeton Collection acquired a psykter from him. Proud of his connoisseurship, his guard slips just a little.

Hecht immediately called Robert Guy, at Princeton, and even over the phone he was enthusiastic. Guy said it sounded to him that it was not unlike a particular vase in one of the other main reference works, on south Italian vases, compiled by an Australian scholar, A. Dale Trendall and updated by Professor Alexander Cambitoglou. Based on the description Hecht gave him, Guy made a preliminary attribution to the Kleophrades Painter. Re-assured, Hecht sent photographs to Marion True at the Getty. She was enthusiastic, too, becoming even more so after she showed the photos to Dyfri Williams at the British Museum. Hecht was asked to bring the vase to Malibu as soon as it had been cleaned “and she did not find unreasonable the price of $700,000.”

With the vase cleaned, Hecht hand-carried it personally—aboard Lufthansa, he tells us—just as he had done with the Euphronios krater. With ceremony, he unwrapped the psykter in the library of the Greek and Roman department of the Getty. To his great consternation, however, Marion was not impressed by the real thing. In fact, she was rather cold and asked that the museum's chief restorer be sent for. All became clear the next morning, when Hecht met True in her office. She told him that the museum would not be buying the psykter because they thought it was a fake. Hecht was incensed.

Some time later, he saw the Getty's restorer and asked him what had made him suspect the vase was not genuine. The restorer replied that some of the black figures, instead of being bluish black, as was normal in a vase of that kind, had a greenish tinge. Hecht was having none of it.

From Hecht's point of view, however, the episode ended happily, because the vase was acquired by the Princeton Art Museum—on the recommendation of none other than Robert Guy. Despite this satisfactory outcome, Hecht couldn't quite let the matter drop entirely. He had been told, he said, that the doubts that had been sown in Marion True's mind about the psykter had come from Britain, and he thought the skeptic was Martin Robertson, former professor of Ancient Archaeology at Oxford
.

Still he wouldn't let go.

Now, besides what this reveals about the provenance of Princeton's red-figured psykter, which the Italian authorities will no doubt be addressing in due course, this episode is also most interesting for the way in which it echoes Hecht's first account of the Euphronios krater affair (the “Medici version”). It is a straightforward narrative, obsessed with flights and sums of money; it gives bare details about seeing the object in Italy at first; then in Switzerland, dwells on the object's reception in the United States, shows off his scholarship and learning, and ends with Hecht triumphant in his claims about the authenticity of the object. In tone, details, and style it is a parallel narrative.

In a final part of the memoir, in which he comments on a series of articles in the 1990s about antiquities looting and smuggling in the
Boston Globe
, by the journalist Walter Robinson, Hecht sets out what we might call his archaeological philosophy. He says he told Robinson, who had telephoned him when researching his articles, that he had never smuggled objects, nor “instigated” the smuggling of objects. He did write that he was “not averse” to buying an antiquity without a pedigree “unless it was demonstrably stolen.” But he went on to insist that “unprovenanced” objects (his quotation marks) are of “more use” to the world if they are in public museums and private collections, rather than in “obscure local salons.”
He also claimed that many objects stolen from Italian museums and private collections had been returned through his “agency,” though he did not give any details.

This was, at the least, an interesting use of the verb “instigate.” At several points in the memoir he meets middle men, either in Rome or Athens, is shown antiquities of one kind or another (at discreet venues where he avoids the limelight), discusses their value, or at least their price, and then takes possession of them in Switzerland, from where he sells them on at a handsome profit. Does this not classify as instigation? When he prevailed upon his “respectable” Swiss girlfriend to fly in to Athens, with forty one-thousand-dollar bills, to pay for some silver figures which he had been offered by an Armenian dealer on Pandrossan Street, and then fly out again, taking the figures with her, did this not count as instigation? When he met Mauro Moroni at the latter's home in Cerveteri and was shown the psykter that was brought to Zurich “within a few days” and which Hecht eventually sold to Princeton, did this not count as instigation? When he demonstrated to Giacomo Medici, in the matter of the kylix with a youth in the tondo, that “quality had a high premium,” did that not count as instigation? He himself said the sale of the kylix was an “eye-opener” for Medici and that, following the incident, “G.M. soon became a faithful purveyor.” We shall encounter similar idiosyncratic use of language again in this book—in Giacomo Medici's defense at his trial.

Hecht's interrogation on March 10, 2001, in Paris, took place twenty-five days after the raid in Boulevard Latour Maubourg. It was classic fencing match. From Ferri's point of view, Hecht was a difficult nut to crack at first, though gradually he did admit some things and contradicted himself several times, so that the overall picture came slowly into focus. Hecht said that he had written the memoir some four or five years before, in 1996 or 1997 (in other words after Hoving's memoirs), and that it contained only fantasies and things that he had heard. He had wanted to write a fascinating book, he said, that would sell well. He said that the first account of the Euphronios krater affair was the version “the Italians wanted” (even though it had been written four or five years before), that he “only hoped
that Medici would give him the vase.” He declined to expand on what, exactly, this meant, though it appears to confirm that Medici had
a
Euphronios vase in December 1971. He admitted that he knew Marion True but denied, at first, that he had ever sold anything to the Getty Museum. Then he changed his story and said that “maybe” he had sold them a bronze figure in the Attic style that he bought in a Swiss collection, and a black-figure cup, and some red-figure vases.